SANTA CRUZ, CA—–For the last Saturday of the 60-year-old Cabrillo Festival featuring five mainline symphonic concerts overall, Music Director Cristian Macelaru focused on a quartet of living women composers, who have formed an ever greater portion of the festival palette in recent years. The festival remains both newsworthy and rather miraculous, limping along with a tired, ancient (and, I’d assert) unsafe sports palace and still attracting near-SRO audiences with nights of contemporary symphonic music, all of it composed in the past 11 years.

And talk about the unique, breezy, only-in-Santa-Cruz personality: I spotted one of the violin principals wheeling up to the concert hall on a bike, violin in hand.

Year after year the Cabrillo audience constitutes a devotional faithful comparable perhaps only to a college sports team, where one dies before giving up the prized subscription seats. This may be a small city of only 63,000, but the intensity pouring across the footlights is palpable, even though not a note of any night’s concert is remotely familiar.

While some of this program was experimental, at least two of the works I could see entering subsequent repertory elsewhere forthwith. Among the best was the exuberant “Tzam” by the Mexican composer Gabriela Ortiz, a buoyant, spirited 21-minute piece with a visionary bent, moving to a distant space much like Strauss’ “Thus Spake Zarathustra” on a grand dimension. Closest to a free form tone poem, “Tzam” uses a broad sound spectrum, including choice passages on the basses and on a cello chorale, before winnowing down to the serenity of pianissimo strings at the end.

Little wonder that her enthusiasts include Gustavo Dudamel, conductor of the L.A. Philharmonic.

The Austrian Olga Neuwirth’s “Dreydl” produces a catchy progression of sound, full of propulsion and sonic starbursts, rhythmically propelled. Over 11 minutes, after a bucolic saxophone solo, the bustling orchestra with the prominent brass accelerates toward its finale.

Math instead of music? The Bay Area’s Gabriella Smith’s converted the progressive thrust of her piece into the title, “sin2x – 1/x,” i.e., the square of sin x minus one over x, with x representing time. It features string tremolos, brass wails and glissandi, and a strong beat, giving way to high-strung exclamation points and culminating in a brass chorale.

The most experimental of the composers was also the best-known, Julia Wolfe. Her 24-minute “rISE and fLY” (sic) is a two-phase display piece for the noted percussion soloist Colin Currie. First he makes all sounds on his body, as if Bobbie McFerrin on speed, and then switches to instruments in an exhausting musical display a la 1950s Gene Krupa, warmly received by the fans on Aug. 12.

Also featured was a memorial tribute to Robert Hughes of Oakland, who had co-founded the festival in a coffee house 60 years ago. In the manner of Baroque notables, Hughes had been a conductor, composer, bassoonist and educator. His work “Uutiqtut” has a breezy march, followed by a deliberately stuttering theme. Swathed in mysticism, it ends unresolved. Or, as Winston Churchill once memorably coined, “a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma.”

Conductor throughout was Music Director Macelaru with his firm rhythmic oversight and sensitivity. Like his musicians, in shirtsleeves.

MUSIC NOTES—Composers Ortiz, Wolfe and Smith introduced their pieces verbally….Among the notables celebrated offstage this year is the affable festival sparkplug Ellen Primack, retiring as executive director after shepherding this silk-purse-out-of-a-sow’s-ear enterprise for the past 33 years….The orchestra’s members hail from 24 states.

THE HALL’S HURDLES—-The Santa Cruz Civic Auditorium is saddled with discomfiting drawbacks. None of the grandstand area offers railings to facilitate the steep stairway descent, and the feeble lighting throughout makes reading program details very difficult. Those sitting on the flat basketball-arena floor may be spared precarious falls, but that offers limited viewing of the performers. At various past time periods, the festival had experimented with a tent as well as out-of-town venues, with inconsistent results. Both the symphony orchestra and the city deserve better facilities.

CABRILLO FESTIVAL OF CONTEMPORARY MUSIC, Cristian Macelaru conducting, Aug. 4-13, Civic Auditorium, Santa Cruz, CA. For info: (831) 426-6966, or go online, www.cabrillomusic.org

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